rich media info

This week, NASA unveiled a new website that touts spin-offs from its technology that have found uses in the bathroom, kitchen, grocery store, and other places. You can find the website by following this link and clicking on “NASA Home and City” in the menu.

Some previous bragging about NASA spin-offs has raised eyebrows, even within the agency itself. Agency staffers questioned earlier boasts about a variety of smoke detector technology that NASA was said to have had a hand in developing.

I had a look at the spin-off website, and although some of the claims are surprising, each is accompanied by a link to further information to back it up.

Read More »

Nintendo launched a new Wii Channel in its homeland Japan today according to IGN, called the Television Friend Channel, or Terebi no Tomo Channel, according to IGN. Like the Mii Contest Channel, Everybody Votes Channel, and etc. before it, it’s available for download free of charge.

As you’d expect, the Channel adds a television program guide to Wii, with program information offered up to one week before airing and searches possible by genre and key words. Although it doesn’t matter much to the rest of the world, it covers Chijou Digital, Chijou Analogue, BS Digital and BS Analogue broadcasts.

There’s Nintendo style though, with a ’stamp’ feature allowing you to highlight programs of interest with a Mii-themed stamp, and to be alerted to those highlighted by your friends and family. These are also tracked and the Wii will rate programs out of five stars based on viewer interest.

Some more neat functionality is employed, with the Wii able to send out alerts to mobile phones or email addresses, and the Wii Remote able to operate as a TV remote for channel surfing and volume control. Nintendo achieves this by having the Wii Sensor Bar send out a signal which is magically bounced off a wall and transmitted back to the TV.

Unfortunately, the chances of the Channel making its way to Australia might be slim, with Nintendo of Europe telling Eurogamer that there are “no plans for Europe.”

Source: aussie-nintendo.com

If you want to understand Microsoft’s motivation for buying Yahoo, look at the price cuts announced today for Windows Vista. (Stay with me on this.)

The price cuts for boxed copies of Vista are especially big in developing countries, where users will be able to buy full versions of the operating system for the price they would have paid for an upgrade. (The better to prevent piracy, Microsoft says.)

In the United States, the main difference will be with the Premium edition (now $129 instead of $159) and the Ultimate ($219, down from $299).

Microsoft says the cuts are meant to lift sales in retail stores, a small segment of the Windows market. The vast majority of operating systems, of course, are sold bundled with computers.
Read More »

MICROSOFT was fined £630 million by the European Commission today for anti-competitive behaviour.
The company has now been penalised a record £1.2 billion by Brussels for unfair competition in the computer market.

That amounts to more than half Microsoft’s annual turnover.

Today’s penalty was for breaches of EU competition policy dating back to March 2004.

Microsoft charged “unreasonable” prices for access to crucial software information to enable its rivals to operate in a market dominated by Microsoft.

Read More »

Microsoft launched Windows Server 2008 in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

With its new features and enhanced tools, Windows Server 2008 has enjoyed a better reception than Windows Vista and has been deployed by a number of companies in beta, Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld.

“The product has been designed to handle substantial data loads. It’s been made over time far more robust than its predecessors. It’s been designed from the ground up to use virtualization technology, terabyte-level and above data storage. It is the first server product from Microsoft designed from cradle to grave to be large enterprise-class.

“It is vastly improved and demonstrates substantial work done on the product since the 2003 drop,” he added.

Read More »